by Abhishek .
From when he emerged from the teleporter, he beheld a city that he had never imagined before. Civilisation spread out to as far as the eye could see but peculiarly so, the horizon curved upwards such that the main parliamentary building, Valhalla as Ram’s father told him, was far away in front of him and the opposite horizon was almost directly overhead. Dr Shanbhag told him that earlier, when all the people of Asr-Gawa had come here to live together, a colossal city was required. In order to gain space, the city was made to curve inwards like a bowl. The hemisphere was then rotated continuously to create gravity for the people on the curved ends so that they didn’t fall down.
“Why did everyone come here?” Ram asked him in a whisper while they made their way through the alleys. Shanbhag smiled at him and brought him to a place from where he could barely look over the curve of the hemispherical city boundary.
“What do you see beyond the periphery?”
Ram squinted and made out the blue of ocean. “Is this city floating on water?”
“Oh no, no! It’s on dry land for sure. But doesn’t something about the sea strike you?”
Ram looked harder. “The horizon seems extremely distant.”
“You have grown up to be very smart, my boy.” A tear rolled down Shanbhag’s cheek as he ruffled Ram’s hair. He had met his son after more than a decade. Shanbhag regretted all growing up that he had missed of Ram from a child to a lad.
“The planet of Asr-Gawa is actually Earth only in another dimension. However, it rotates faster than our Earth.” He gulped down his emotions, his voice a little raspy. “Fast enough to reduce it’s cycle of day and night to a few hours. However, we are at the north pole and due to a tilt in the planet’s orbital trajectory around its star, we enjoy a similar half year night and half year day cycle like on Earth. Remember how Earth has a bulge at the equator?”
Ram nodded.
“Imagine that bulge to increase such that the planet looks like a flattened sphere from outer space. That is the problem with this planet. As a result, the tidal effects of the oceans are extremely violent. The oceans cover the entire planet save a large landmass in the North Pole and another in the south. This drove all the people who previously resided in the island territories around the planet to migrate to the poles while the islands slowly sunk. There is a rumour about a few islands surviving but no one knows for sure. That is how everybody came here.”
There were hardly any people on the road. Dusk had fallen, or so it seemed from the colour of the sky but now Ram knew that Asr-Gawa being on the pole caused day to look like night in the winter. When he had first come to Asr-Gawa, the few people who were on the streets were the last ones collecting their daily rations. All of them had a sickly look with pale skin and sunken eyes. They seemed feeble, ungainly and unhappy about their existence. Dr Shanbhag, though not to the extent of the common folk, also looked thin. For that moment, Ram thought it better not to ask his father about this condition.
Dr Shanbhag had furtively brought Ram to a small inn near the border of the city. He nodded to the security guard standing at the doorway. They shared a silent understanding, one that had grown over ten years of friendship between the doctor and the staff at the inn. Once Ram was checked in, Shanbhag said that he had some work to be finished and made sure that Ram was safe. After that he would return.
“But why are you being so secretive? Am I not allowed here?”
Shanbhag smiled nervously. “You are in alien waters, Ram. Ever thought about what happens when you land up in a country illegally, without any identification?”
Hitherto, Shanbhag hadn’t returned and Ram was alone, pondering about everything that had gone wrong and right and everything that had led up to this moment.
Suddenly, there was a rap on the door. Ram walked cautiously up to the 2D photoelastic display screen which displayed his father waiting outside the door. Shanbhag had checked Ram into an economical lodge where holographic projectors were too expensive to afford. Otherwise, nearly every house of the elites of the society and lodges had holographic projectors. Everybody else had switched back to the older photoelastic screens.
Ram opened the sliding door and Chandra Shanbhag walked in with his characteristic strong and powerful gait with his back a little hunched up which happened whenever he walked. He wore the same clothes he had worn earlier—thick loafers made up of some coarse fabric, black trousers, an off-white shirt with thin stiff collars and a beige overcoat with narrow lapels—all of which hugged his thin frame but seemed to adjust themselves as he moved. Shanbhag closed the door behind him and checked the screen intently before he walked back to where his son sat on the bed and sat beside him.
Dr Chandra Shanbhag gave Ram a sealed white box which seemed to be made of plastic and was grainy to the touch. Ram opened it to find a cube shaped slab of bacon like meat with another small plastic box which contained greens.
“After living in London all your life, I had a feeling that you had not refrained from eating meat as was our family custom. Besides, you are hungry and this will be rather nourishing.” Shanbhag was looking down at the floor all this while, avoiding eye contact.
“Your work. It’s finished?” Ram asked him after taking a bite of the cured meat. It tasted salty but tougher than bacon. Since the previous night, neither of them had slept well.
Even though Ram had craved the touch of his father, he was still a little uncomfortable and formal with him after all these years.
“Yes. It’s done,” he replied and looked at him with soft but puffy eyes that seemed to want to absorb everything in. “But I am not sure whether your entry into Asr-Gawa was undetected.”
“What will happen if somebody finds me?”
“Instant deportation. They will consider sending you back to Earth only if the probability of teleporting someone back from there is very less.”
“I don’t understand you.”
“Now that you have been teleported to Asr-Gawa, someone from here has been teleported to Earth in order to conserve mass and energy. Since it’s not an exact science, the objects in transfer can also be inanimate.”
“Do you know this person?” Ram asked him curiously.
“Yes, she was an associate in my Lab. She was near the Lab Teleportation portal when you came bursting forth. I am sure she must have landed on Earth at the very place you were when you came in. But that doesn’t matter now. What matters is whether someone else must have spotted this material exchange. We can only wait, Ram. There is nothing we can do now except continue hiding you. Or else, they might not deport you. They might even imprison you here, like they did to me. Intellect is valuable over here in Asr-Gawa.”
There was dead air between the two for a while.
“It’s nice to see you like this, Ram. All grown up.” Shanbhag broke the silence.
“It has been an unimaginably long time.” Ram kept his hand on his father’s shoulder. He had a strange moment when he realised how thin his father’s frame felt under his fingers.
“Papa.”
Shanbhag turned his head quickly towards Ram, as if not he did not want to miss the moment when Ram called him ‘Papa’. “Why does the city become so dark at night? I mean, the only places with electric light still switched on is the Valhalla building and the scientific research laboratory you spoke of.
What about the rest of the city?”
“There are curfews, beyond which people cannot use electricity. You see, Ram, Asr-Gawa is falling short of an element that is imperative to make the society run and the SDRD is currently working on a solution. Just as on Earth, the best sources of energy are fossil fuels, Makto is the resource Asurians use to generate power.”
Instantly, a thought crossed Ram’s mind.
“Oh! Makto... this makes sense... Noah’s diary,” Ram started mulling over a thought that came up.
“Noah’s diary?” Dr Shanbhag furled his eyebrows.
“Yeah... you carry on. I will tell you everything in one go,” replied
Ram controlling the excitement that suddenly surged through him.
“Alright then. So Makto is running very low. Now what do you think would happen if oil on Earth would be measured in thousands of barrels rather than billions?”
Ram rubbed his chin. “Well, global energy output would be decreased which means that people would have to start using renewable sources.”
“What if the technology is advanced in only one direction and isn’t advanced enough in other directions to use renewable sources on such a massive scale?” Shanbhag interjected. “If that happens, then... people would have to go back to old methods where one lived in the dark at night and cycled to work in the morning. The government would control the energy produced by the little oil that would be left and rich people will grow more powerful if they could corner this precious resource. Hence, plutocracy would prevail and global economy could be grounded.”
Ram stared out at the darkness beyond the balcony and scratched his head. He had imagined Asr-Gawa to be a perfect society; something quite heavenly, a land of the Gods.
He remembered Baldr saying, “Our cities are way beyond ‘advanced’ can define.” Ram realised Baldr’s play of luring Mathias and him into his programme.
“Now do you see, why Asr-Gawa is so dark at night and why the people look so miserable?” Shanbhag grinned thinly at Ram.
“So Asr-Gawa is falling short of Makto,” Ram confirmed.
“Hardly any pebbles left,” Shanbhag shrugged.
“Whatever may be happening here in Asr-Gawa, what happened to you?” Ram blurted, his voice raised in vexation. “How are you here?” He had seen his father after too long a time and in an alien land out of the reaches of the dimension he lived in. Ram’s head was throbbing because of the questions popping up in his head, so many questions that he frequently forgot a few of them.
“I am sorry, Ram. I did not mean to abandon you. I was suddenly abducted....”
“You don’t need to apologise! I... kind of know what happened with you,” Ram said.
“You do?” Chandra Shanbhag was utterly surprised.
Ram nodded. “Yes, I heard from Baldr that he had killed you. Obviously that was a lie, and he abducted you, but I would like to hear the rest from you.”
“Well, what happened nearly fifteen years ago seems like thirty. You remember about my expedition to the Himalayas?” He asked Ram and he nodded. “I have yet to listen to your story but I presume that you have gone through enough to be able to believe my story.”
“After everything I went through, I can now believe in almost everything,” said Ram, giving his father a thin smile which said it all.
* * *
“Fifteen year ago, my fellow scientists and I at Cambridge, succeeded in developing a device that was able to show the so called ‘River of Time’ as a continuous line on a graph. The prototype was called Chronoscale. You know what scale is, ‘chrono’ meaning time. This graph only showed time for us in Cambridge with respect to the entire universe. So, you can imagine the amount of calculations needed, taking into account our velocity, Earth’s, the solar system’s, the galaxy’s and so on until we had taken into account our exact velocity as we zip through the universe. A lot of relativistic equations and field equations resulted in the making of the Chronoscale. The basic concept was that time did not flow in a constant way, but there were disruptions in the flow when time slowed down or quickened up. Whenever time slowed down for let’s say, the Earth with respect to the sun, the chronoscale would show a dip in the otherwise straight line. If the flow of time quickened suddenly, the graph would rise,” Shanbhag paused to allow the concept to settle in. “Once we had a made a Chronoscale Shift Detector, CSD as we called it, we could accurately measure these disruptions. This machine of ours was an invention of a generation! Finally, we were able to depict the flow of time of the entire universe on a small LCD screen. However, one fine day, my team of scientists discovered a mind-boggling dip in the CSD graph. The line had bent vertically downwards, went out of the screen and come perpendicularly back again to resume the straight flow of time. “This was a momentous discovery for us. We knew that time could slow down or accelerate due to Einstein’s theory of relativity but didn’t know that some uncanny phenomenon could completely halt time for a few moments. We had the feeling that this could have been taking place from a long time ago but only with our CSD were we able to detect this kink in the river of time.
“Any natural phenomena must be triggered from a specific location in the universe. So, we dug deeper and located something in the Himalayan range which could have had rendered time immobile for some time.”
Ram’s eyes widened. It was now that he understood the significance of Baldr’s story that his father had discovered their base and had to be taken down. Ram laughed inwardly on how he had misinterpreted him. Baldr told him only half the truth and Ram fell for his verbal trap.
“After that,” Ram continued with a quavering voice, “You discovered Baldr’s top secret base and were taken into custody for trespassing, weren’t you?”
Chandra Shanbhag’s sad eyes conveyed all the trouble he must have had to face in the past. “Yes. However you got here, you have to still tell me how, you must have met Baldr on your way. How did you like that pest of a man?” The hint of a smile appeared on his lips.
“He told us that he had you killed! I was shattered, Papa! He lied to me and Mathias!” A tear rolled down Ram’s cheek and he embraced his father so tightly that he broke away, afraid that his frail father might suffocate.
“Baldr has his ways, Ram. Only he can tell you why he lied to you, son, as I don’t think he ever intended to kill me. In reality, I was indeed captured by him and his band of barbarians. Anyway, they imprisoned me and slashed my connections with the outer world. I remember following the lead to the foot of the Nanda Devi Mountain but after that, I have no memory between closing and opening my eyes. I remember waking up in a cell, nay a deep recess in a metal wall. I was seated in a chair. Baldr and a dozen of his men were standing in front of me.”
* * *
Chandra Shanbhag remembered the entire event lucidly. Baldr’s face and the cold visage of all his men were barely visible in the dark. They looked like pale demons, about to swallow him whole. A source of light came from their back, like a halo behind Baldr’s head, and shone right on Shanbhag’s face. He squinted his eyes and could scarcely make out their inhospitable facial expressions. Baldr was the first one to ask him who he was.
“Why have you brought me here? Shanbhag mustered his courage and shouted at them. “I came here on scientific purposes! How dare you treat me like this?” Instantly, he was answered by a punch to his right cheek. Shanbhag’s head spun and his right cheek seemed to throb painfully.
“I will ask you again. Who are you?” Baldr asked him with sinister patience. His airy baritone voice echoed throughout the room.
“I didn’t do anything wro ....” Shanbhag tried to sort things out in a placatory tone but this time, a slap from the left set his opposite cheek on fire. Chandra Shanbhag knew clearly that he wouldn’t be able to get out of this mess easily.
“I... I... a... I am a physicist from the University of Cambridge, UK. My name is Dr Chandra Shanbhag.”
“Now that’s more like it!” Shanbhag could almost detect a smile. “And may I ask you your reason to be here?” Baldr asked him with an uncanny cordiality.
“I came here with my team to investigate a strange phenomenon. Our newly discovered device detected a... pause in time that was triggered by something over here.” A bead of sweat rolled down Shanbhag’s head.
“You came here to investigate an anomaly in time, you say?” Baldr’s voice showed incredulity. Shanbhag nodded and kept quiet.
“I...,” Shanbhag said through clenched teeth, “I am a physicist.”
Baldr nodded and Shanbhag flinched in anticipation of assault but no one hit him. Baldr seemed to finally believe Shanbhag.
“You see, Dr Shanbhag, you
have stepped into very, very dangerous grounds and have got to know about something very delicate. Now obviously, we cannot let you go.” There was a calm in his voice which sent a shiver down Shanbhag’s back, almost as if he was following a protocol.
“What government do you work for? I am sure this can be sorted out with the Indian government over here?” Shanbhag tried.
Baldr turned on his heels and walked away. “Oh, Dr Shanbhag! We don’t work for any government. We just aren’t... from here.” With that, the dark figures walked away, their muffled whispers echoing off the solid walls of the corridor.
Three of his stocky men were standing right behind Shanbhag. Baldr commanded them to make Shanbhag ready and disappeared from view.
Shanbhag was stripped off his belongings. Mobile phones, identity cards, wallet, GPS, everything except the portable CSD extension. He watched helplessly as everything was confiscated from him. He remembered his child, Ram. Shanbhag didn’t know what they were going to do to him but if he were to be killed, he felt deep remorse for not being able to meet Ram again. Poor Ram would now be an orphan without the warmth of a father or mother. Shanbhag remembered his last moments with his wife before she died of childbirth. How long ago was that time and yet, he remembered Ram come out of his mother’s womb with the same bright green eyes as she once had.